TUSCALOOSA, Alabama (AP) -- American politics changed 40 years ago this week at a schoolhouse door.

Five months after vowing "segregation forever" at his 1963 inaugural, Gov. George C. Wallace tried to block the admission of two black students to the all-white University of Alabama.

Wallace's defiant "stand in the schoolhouse door," failed to keep out minorities -- with about 19,600 students, Alabama's student body is now 13 percent black. But it launched Wallace onto the national political scene and moved the Democratic Party firmly into the corner of civil rights.

"What happened that day did represent a tectonic shift in American politics," said Culpepper Clark, Alabama's communications dean and the author of a book on the showdown.

Like other places, Alabama still has racial problems. Jesse Jackson visited the state recently in opposition to the hiring of a white football coach over a black candidate, and fraternities and sororities are still mostly segregated.

"There's very little mingling going on in the dining area, and that's very frustrating," Hood [one of the first negros to integrate the school] said. "The fight that I fought was for us to be able to mingle with other students."
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Oh, and I suppose that's why there are black dorms, etc. -- to encourage "mingling?" Fighting in order to "mingle?"